Product Description

Programming Interviews Exposed
2nd Edition

The pressure is on during the interview process but with the right preparation, you can walk away with your dream job. This classic book uncovers what interviews are really like at America's top software and computer companies and provides you with the tools to succeed in any situation. The authors take you step-by-step through new problems and complex brainteasers they were asked during recent technical interviews.

50 interview scenarios are presented along with in-depth analysis of the possible solutions. The problem-solving process is clearly illustrated so you'll be able to easily apply what you've learned during crunch time. You'll also find expert tips on what questions to ask, how to approach a problem, and how to recover if you become stuck. All of this will help you ace the interview and get the job you want.

What you will learn from this book

* Tips for effectively completing the job application
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Ways to prepare for the entire programming interview process
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How to find the kind of programming job that fits you best
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Strategies for choosing a solution and what your approach says about you
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How to improve your interviewing skills so that you can respond to any question or situation
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Techniques for solving knowledge-based problems, logic puzzles, and programming problems

Who this book is for

This book is for programmers and developers applying for jobs in the software industry or in IT departments of major corporations.

Wrox Beginning guides are crafted to make learning programming languages and technologies easier than you think, providing a structured, tutorial format that will guide you through all the techniques involved.

Customer Reviews:

• An excellent comprehensive read
  This book starts off with general stuff that you need to know in order to land a job in the computer industry and then goes into the depths of programming details that really matter. It just about covers everything that you'll need to do well in a Development interview. No redundant stuff here! Solutions to problems have been explained extremely well. Not only that but it gives a lot of insight on how to approach problems, identifies the obvious solutions and then directs you to the optimal one. There's great emphasis on analysis and efficiency of algorithms.
  
  I regret not getting it earlier!!! It's a must read for anyone interviewing in the computer industry! ...more info
• good for starters else shallow at best
  This book is an OK book; has losts of bugs on the examples and some proposed solutions are misleading (ie. UnflattenList can be easily implemented by traversing the double linked list from the tail, but the book says is not efficient, not true, need to worry about who is the father not the child.)
  Good to revisit basic concepts; good for fresh out of school trying to land the first job; shallow at best for professionals of the industry trying to shift roles (ie. PM trying to get a DEV job)
  ...more info
• Rather thin
  For a collection of interview questions - which is not the book's sole purpose - this is a pretty thin, and oddly oriented, one. As you can confirm by reviewing the table of contents, accessible via "Search inside this book", the chapter on OOP is one of the shortest in the book, totalling ten pages, and fewer than five questions. The longest chapter is on linked lists, and a total of two chapters are given to several brainteasers. Are IT interviews really like that?...more info
• Great overview of gaps you may have in your knowledge
  This book ended up being very valuable, not only for my interviews but as a guide to where I had gaps in my knowledge. When you learn mostly on the job as I have, you end up not having good coverage of some theoretical areas. I learned a ton from this book and it was directly helpful in answering more than one interview question....more info
• Not sure anyone other than recent grads will see questions
  This is a good book if you are a recent graduate without any on-the-job experience, but I'm not sure if experienced programmers will many of these questions. My main profession isn't programming (although that's what I interviewed for), but I would think experienced programmers will see more real-life specific questions before they encounter questions about linked lists and hashes....more info
• Utterly useless
  Quick facts: In the past year and a half, I graduated college, underwent five interviews, four of which resulted in offers. In none of those interviews did any questions from this book come up.
  
  This book is not a practical guide to interviews. It's a red-eye catch-up course in first-year computer science. If you don't need that refresher, you don't need this book....more info
• Not a silver bullet
  The bulk (90%) of this book focuses on basic C.S. algorithms. A few pages at the end are dedicated to the "soft questions", or non-technical stuff.
  
  Really, this book is a direct result of the "Interview 2.0" concept that came out in the late 90s and still persists. I feel that a lot of tech companies (except perhaps a select few, such as Google and MS) have realized that interviews based exclusively on basic C.S. algorithm knowledge isn't the way to pick the best candidate.
  
  There is a *ton* of material in this book. If you focus on it, you may end up shooting yourself in the foot. So make sure your target company is going to be focused on algorithm questions before you put the time into doing the problems here. Or avoid those companies. Honestly, you're wasting your life relearning this stuff, as interesting as it is, unless you're going to be designing algorithmic libraries.
  
  Also, don't forget the soft questions (your past experience is really important!).
  
  Update, 2009-02-23:
  Looking back at this review, I may have been a bit too harsh. This is an excellent book in a lot of ways. It is a great review of some of the more famous algorithm problems in computer science (although I'd recommend picking up Bentley's Programming Pearls if you want a real glance into famous algorithmic problems). It also has some general good advice on soft questions, although I wish it had spent more time on this area - as I learned the hard way in one of my first interviews looking for a new job. And hence why I rated this 3 stars at the time.
  
  Regardless, I still flip through it every time before an interview... So if I could, I would revise my rating up to 4 stars....more info
• Too simple
  While the book is fairly well written, I found it too simple for me. If you have little experience with C, linked lists, recursion and binary trees, then the book explains their usage pretty well. If you buy this book to find challenging problems, then there are only a few of them. The rest is your ordinary "how to invert a linked list" stuff....more info
• Very useful read for C interviews
  It's not only a good book to read for interviews, it is also a good book to review basic programming concepts, which you can easily forget. I recommend this book and I wish there were similar books specifically for Java, C++, and C#....more info
• Awesome Book! Must have for everyone preparing for Software Development interviews
  As heard, the best interview preparation book I have ever read. Examples make it much more interesting. Recommended for everyone taking the S/W Development Interviews!...more info
• Amazing
  I was a fresh graduate looking for a job in the software development field. My university career services office gave me a library worth of reading material. It proved to be useless at my first interview - I bombed. It wasn't that I didnt know programming, it was that I wasn't prepared for the type of questions that would be asked. I was looking for questions like "what are your career goals" and the question I got was "write a function to turn an integer into a string and vice versa." I found this book on amazon, bought it and studied it from cover to cover, did all the programming exercises by myself, tried solving all the puzzles before I looked up the answers. The result, I landed my first job within a week. At the interview, one of the questions they asked me came straight from this book, one of the questions was slightly similar but much harder, and one question was completely different but by using the thought process listed in the book it was a piece of cake. The verdict: Buy this book. It is invaluable. It is very well written. It is very relevant. It teaches you how to approach programming problems and various puzzles. The authors come off as very smart people. The best thing about this book is that after presenting a problem it doesnt give you an answer right away. It leads you into the problem just as you would naturally solve a problem. The result is that once you have read a problem, you can try and solve it, or you can read a couple of lines and it gives you a hint in the right direction. Even if you have to read the complete text of the problem, the coded answer comes last so you can still try your hand at it before you look at the final code. This is an amazing book....more info
• Be Prepared!
  This book is all you will need to land the programming job of your dreams. After reading it, you will be prepared, and therefore comfortable answering any question, or solve any programming problem the interviewer can throw at you. The authors teach you how to approach a question, and give you plenty of practice with sample problems on recursion, trees and graphs, and a variety of other common interview problems. If you are like me, you will enjoy solving the brain-teasing puzzles just for the sheer challenge of it. Buy the book, and best of luck!...more info
• PIE
  This book is an excellent preparation for technical interviews. Although there are a few errors, it's good practice to be able to catch these. Don't put all your faith in one book. Instead, this book is a guide to get you thinking about algorithms, data structures, and abstract thinking. Overall, PIE is great! I read it twice before my interview. ...more info
• A must have if you are applying for jobs iin USA
  I got this book on recomendation from one of my friend...it covers all the basic topics most of the interviews ask you...infact all the interviews I gave have atleast 2 direct questions from this book...
  
  It gives you the overview of how to prepare for interview and what question to expect...covers wide rage of topics from Programming - HR - genaral computers knowledge....more info
• Nice review of computer science and puzzles
  This book serves as a good review for the student of computer science, prior to entering the interview arena. The trick questions and puzzles that are in common use by technical interviewers are covered, as well as a general overview of the interview and job hunting process. I must recommend the book for those unfamiliar with the interview process, and unprepared for the sometimes bizarre questions that interviewers ask(particularly the infamous Microsoft questions, i.e., Why is a manhole cover round?). For those familiar with the interview experience, it may serve as a guide for interviewing your own job candidates (the reason I bought it, myself).

  For a better review of CS topics, I recommend Brookshear's Computer Science, An Overview, sold here on Amazon....more info

• Useful if studied correctly - one of the few helpful books you'll find on programming interviews
  I just finished rereading this book, and read the earlier Amazon interviews. Though I agree with many of the observations in the other reviews, their judgments are mostly too extreme. This book is definitely of value, but reading it won't unlock the keys to any secret kingdom of guaranteed job-landing success.
  
  I've been interviewing and hiring software developers for almost 15 years, and I know one thing you can be sure about software interview processes: their inconsistency. Interviewing and hiring practices for software development are all over the map. As a matter of fact, all software development practices are all over the map, and how you are judged a success or failure once you land a job are at least as subjective and error-prone as how you are evaluated in interviews.
  
  Landing a particular software development job and being successful at it once you get it require a lot of learning about the particular mix of priorities and practices on each particular team, and fitting into that mix. You could be interviewing with a sixty-year-old toy manufacturing veteran doing tiny embedded systems, and any mention of object-oriented technology could be immediate grounds for a religious no-hire. On the other hand, you could be interviewing with a young hotshot at a new Silicon Valley startup. In this case you'd not only better be fluent with every aspect of object-oriented technology, best practices, and the latest open-source frameworks, but you'd better not make too much of space optimizations or "the overhead of a subroutine call" or you'll be branded as hopelessly old fashioned.
  
  Consequently, the advice in this book is quite valuable about communicating throughout the interview, telling the interviewer the thoughts behind what you are doing and asking clarifying questions as you go. No book by itself can help you with any interview you might encounter. However, with all its flaws, this book does a better job than any other available book in discussing programming questions, how to approach them, and possible answers. The idea that only "recent grads" are ever asked general programming questions like this is hogwash. I hire veteran developers for high-end product development jobs almost exclusively, and I ask programming questions like the ones in this book all the time, and so do most of the good interviewers I know. I've found over the years that programming questions give me among the most direct and accurate assessments of a developer's skills. Asking programming questions is enough of a best practice that you should be suspicious of a technology company that doesn't include them in its interview process. (Hey, I said that development practices were all over the map, but I didn't say that most of them were any good. How else could the software industry achieve its miserable 40% success rate?)
  
  As far as the books weaknesses, probably the biggest is that almost all the questions, answers, and discussion are in straight procedural C. It's hard to reason why this book shows such a lack of emphasis on object-oriented technology considering it had been the state of the art for 10 years when this book was published in 2000. So, though there are a few small examples of OO class designs thrown in, discussion is missing of important topics like inheritance, composition, encapsulation, and structured exception handling. Even when you are programming in an OO language, however, the logic inside the methods you write for these kinds of general exercises is mostly the same as you would write in a procedural language. So most of this book is relevant, but you must translate to OO on your own.
  
  A more subtle and perhaps more important weakness of this book is that topics such as performance, scalability, error handling, and public vs. internal interface design are haphazardly covered and sometimes skipped. Because of the inconsistency of development practices, there is usually no ultimate "right" answer to any of these questions. Some of the recommended "best" answers in this book have some glaring failure cases that are not covered, and covering these cases will obliterate the simplicity and performance characteristics of the "best" answer. So you always need to probe your interviewers for your constraints, such as invalid inputs, what if memory allocation fails, who are your users, etc...
  
  Ultimately, this is a useful book. You will probably do better on a software development job interview if you read this book. Stay away from the superficial treatment most people give books such as this of just trying to memorize the questions and answers. If you read this book thoughtfully, coding and testing your own answers to the exercises as you go, and evaluating the strengths and weaknesses of what's in the book, you'll definitely do better on any interview where you are asked direct coding questions. It is like learning one more person's point of view on relevant development practices, and the more you do that, the more rounded you will be and better you will do overall at both interviews and once on the job. Best of luck and I hope you find a programming job that fits you well....more info
• Practical Tips for Programming Interviews
  This book contains valuable, practical tips for doing well in programming interviews. It has a well-rounded set of sample questions. These questions aren't exhaustive, but they give you a good idea of what to expect and how to approach problems in an interview setting....more info
• First of it's kind, truely being prepared for the interview
  This book is the first of it's kind that I could find anywhere. There are lots of books with tips for interviewing, but interviewing in the programming field is very different as any programmer knows. The questions you face are get into a different type of logic, and this book tells you what to expect and how to prepare. If you really want the job, you should read this book first. Chances are other applicants will......more info